Wow, I have not written in this blog for a long time. Almost five months! It is true that I have been busy, trying to get work done and keep things running smoothly at home. Mostly though, I just haven’t been prioritizing writing a blog. I don’t think that will change too much, but I’ll try to get a few posts in here and there.

The main problem is that if I put a computer on my lap, that is an open invitation to Alan to come around and start pounding on keys to see what they do. (Mostly the make me mad, and then I have to close up the computer.) Alan is walking around like a pro now, and anything within outstretched arm reach is fair game to be grabbed, pulled, hit, and generally abused. So that means that when I’m at home, I pretty much am not doing computer things.

I’ve been making special effort lately to come home from work before the sun sets, and then I take Alan out for a walk. Usually that means that he walks to the elevator, presses the down button (and probably the up button) then a few buttons in the elevator, and wants to be picked up not too much longer after that. We wander around outside for a bit and he waves hello to basically everyone.

Anyway, Alan recently started going to day care, and probably because of that our family has been sick for the past two weeks. With colds that just won’t go away. Or maybe one does go away, and a new, different strain takes it place. I’m really getting sick of it.

Alan is just about getting to the point where he does not need to be held every waking minute, so I’ve started to get a little bit more free time. Just a little bit. I’ve been doing two things: playing around a bit with Android programming (fun!) and playing a little bit of Street Fighter IV. I’ve also been watching some basketball games, but usually that turns into taking Alan over to the balcony and looking for boats, so I’m not really paying too much attention to the games.

Speaking of the balcony, Alan really like it. From out condo we have a nice view of a canal that connects to Tokyo bay. Boats go through there every once in a while. The weather has recently got pretty nice, and jetskis have started popping up, as well as a boat pulling a wake boarder. There is a company around here that offers that, but I haven’t been able to find them on the internet. Alan really likes the boats – he has his own sign for boat. He also has learned airplane, which is convenient because we can see a lot of those coming and going out of Haneda airport which isn’t too far. We can also see the Tokyo Monorail pretty well, and he loves watching those go by. We have a nice view of a bridge and a highway, so he’ll sometimes point out busses too, but I haven’t been able to teach him the sign for bus yet.

Because the weather is nice now, I expect to be spending a lot of time out there with Alan. I’d better clean the balcony up!

Other fun stuff: I figure in the next week or two I’ll be able to get my T. Hawk ranking up to B+. The online ranking component doesn’t really seem to mean anything though, other than the more you play the higher your rank goes. That isn’t quite true, because there are rules about points going up and down, but more or less, if you play more on average your score will go up. I’m still kind of excited to get a B+ ranking though.

Finally, programming with Android. This has been fun. I actually got my Kindle Fire set up so I can run my own programs on it. It is really exciting to see something that I wrote working on a small touchscreen. I’ve got two apps I’m working on: one is super dumb and just for me, to track my wins and losses in street fighter because I want to see that kind of data. The other is an android implementation of my manga translation program. I think if I have that on a tablet it will be a lot easier to translate more. Even if not, it will be fun to program the thing up and correct a few mistakes I made in the desktop Java version. Mostly, architecting a more clean model for displaying the text bubbles.

I’ll try to post a bit more too! And take more pictures. Looking through the pictures that we’ve taken recently, I just don’t have enough showing how far Alan has come from a non-moving slug-like being to the small human that he is now!